Quotes About Contradiction

It's amazing to me - what is this love affair we have with bad guys? With the bad boy in high school, with the anti-hero, et cetera, et cetera? Because I was always just a very nice boy. I didn't get it.

I always laugh a lot when I see the dramas that I end up doing. I see myself behaving very seriously and I'm like, 'What is this?'

McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print.

Not all great presidents were always good, and neither individuals nor nations are without evil.

America has always been torn between the ideal and the real, between noble goals and inevitable compromises.

We have long proved ourselves quite capable of living with this contradiction, using Hamiltonian means (centralized decision-making) while speaking in Jeffersonian rhetorical terms (that government is best which governs least).

like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

Cause if there's one thing Islamic terrorists don't have is....(seriously thinking about it)....%#@&!

From love arises hatred of those things which are contrary to what we love, or which oppose and thwart us in those things that we delight in.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.

Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death:

The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.

It was this other side of Avery - the fact that he so visibly had an other side - that was helping me finally understand all three of the dimensions in Kafka: that a man could be a sweet, sympathetic, comically needy victim and a lascivious, self-aggrandizing, grudge-bearing bore, and also, crucially, a third thing: a flickering consciousness, a simultaneity of culpable urge and poignant self-reproach, a person in process.

Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

Esa no era la persona que él creía ser, o la que habría elegido ser si hubiera tenido la libertad de elegir, pero había algo reconfortante y liberador en ser una persona real y definida, y no una colección de personas potenciales y contradictorias.

It was so easy to blame the mother. Life a miserable contradiction, endless desire but limited supplies, your birth just a ticket to your death: why not blame the person who'd stuck you with a life? OK, maybe it was unfair. But your mother could always blame her own mother, who herself could blame the mother, and so on back to the Garden. People had been blaming the mother forever, and most of them, Andreas was pretty sure, had mothers less blameworthy than his.

He loved New York. He hated it. It was a cathedral of possibilities, it would never settle down.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.

My insides don't match up with my outsides. -Do anyone's inside and outsides match up? -I don't know. I'm only me. -Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside.

I have an aristocratic smile and like to punch people.

You are very funny Jonathan. No. That is the last thing I want to be. Why? To be funny is a great thing. No it's not. Why is this? I used to thing that humor was the only way to appreciate how wonderful and terrible the world is, to celebrate how big life is. You know what I mean? Yes of course. But now I think it's the opposite. Humor is a way of shrinking from that wonderful and terrible world.

What do you think is going on?' 'I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

I heartily hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, ans so forth.